Reflection using Pauli matrices.

In class yesterday (lecture 19, notes not yet posted) we used \( \Bsigma^\T = -\sigma_2 \Bsigma \sigma_2 \), which implicitly shows that \( (\Bsigma \cdot \Bx)^\T \) is a reflection about the y-axis.
This form of reflection will be familiar to a student of geometric algebra (see [1] — a great book, one copy of which is in the physics library). I can’t recall any mention of the geometrical reflection identity from when I took QM. It’s a fun exercise to demonstrate the reflection identity when constrained to the Pauli matrix notation.

When we expand \( (\Bsigma \cdot \Bx)^\T \) and find
\begin{equation}\label{eqn:reflection:n}
(\Bsigma \cdot \Bx)^\T
=
\sigma^1 x^1 – \sigma^2 x^2 + \sigma^3 x^3,
\end{equation}
it is clear that this coordinate expansion is a reflection about the y-axis. Knowing the reflection formula above provides a rationale for why we might want to write this in the compact form \( -\sigma^2 (\Bsigma \cdot \Bx) \sigma^2 \), which might not be obvious otherwise.